If you've been skipping out on exercising, and hitting the booze every night, you're probably gotten a a bit of a beer belly. And while that pudgy gut is pretty embarrassing, remember it could always be worse. You could find out that it's not a beer belly - it's a tumor.
After getting heart surgery, Kevin Daly, 63, realized that he had packed on a few pounds, especially around the stomach. So, he decided to lose some weight. But after dropping 34 pounds, he had his still 'spare tire.' Everyone assumed it was a beer belly, but Kevin knew that couldn't be the case, and he was very confused. "I never drank beer," explained Kevin, in an interview with CBS. "Don't like it, [I've] always been athletic, [and] never had a belly... I thought [the doctors] literally left stuffing and tools in me from surgery."
Alarm bells rang in Kevin's head. He decided to go to the hospital, and insisted on getting a CAT scan, despite the objections of his insurance provider. It's a good thing he did. The doctors discovered that his 'beer belly' was actually a thirty pound tumor growing inside his abdomen. It was the size of a beach ball, so big that it had wrapped itself around one of his kidneys. "Not a good thing," said Kevin.
After six hours of careful dissection, the doctors successfully removed the enormous tumor. It was the largest tumor they had had ever removed, and triple the size they predicted. "It's one thing to see the picture," said Kevin's surgeon, Dr Julio Teixeira. "It's another thing to actually have it in your hands... We had to take a kidney [out too] because it was invading and [we] had to make sure we got it all."
The doctors estimate that the tumor must have grown for 10 to 15 years to reach such a immense size. "Although these tumors are large and malignant, they grow slowly and tend to not metastasize,"" explained Dr. Teixeira. "Often there's a very good prognosis." Luckily, the tumor - technically, liposarcoma, a low grade, fatty cancer - did not cause any other organs in his body to fail.
Two months later, Kevin says that he's feeling great, and considers himself lucky to be alive. While the doctors will monitor him with regular MRI's, he will not need any chemotherapy or radiation. "I dodged a couple of bullets," said Kevin. Yes, you certainly did! Now you should celebrate by drinking a...chocolate milkshake. Just a chocolate milkshake. Nothing else.
Congratulations to Kevin on making a full recovery. If you find yourself in a similar situation, be sure to visit the hospital, so they can catch the problem before it gets worse. And if you're a healthy person who happens to have a beer belly, maybe you should learn to love that gut. As you know, it could always be worse.
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